For businesses large and small, relying on a cloud-based collaboration and productivity suite such as Microsoft Office 365 is becoming the norm. Enhancing productivity in your organisation is vital to get ahead in 2017 - and using Office 365 can help, if it's used right...

Microsoft faces ire of IT staff with faulty Patch Tuesday update

MS16-072 update exposes hidden drives

Microsoft has created problems for system administrators with the latest Patch Tuesday update after one of the fixes exposed drives that were supposed to be hidden.

IT workers on Reddit and Microsoft support forums complained that MS16-072 patch was causing the problems.

The original poster on Microsoft Technet said: "I installed Windows patches last night and this morning found out that there were a number of issues with my GPOs [Group Policy Objects]," they wrote.

"Example: desktop image would not show up. A, B, C and D drives that were meant to be hidden from users are now showing up. When I uninstalled this update and rebooted, everything was back to normal."

As the user noted, and many others on Reddit, the problems can be fixed by simply removing the update, but it's an embarrassing situation for Microsoft's Update process which has already seen multiple instances of security updates that have caused machines and even networks to crash.

Sysadmins have had to fight to be heard in their demands to have more granular control over the installation of updates in Windows 10, which was initially going to be limited to unseen automatic updates.

The fact remains, however, that the sheer number of 'me too' cases across Reddit and Technet proves that this patch wasn't tested properly, and that will concern the people who put their trust in Windows to run their business.